


Night comes a-calling

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Night Manager (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Bisexuality, Canon Typical Attitudes, Catholic Character, Class Issues, Consent Issues, Homophobic Language, M/M, Oral Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-08-14 15:17:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16495151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Before Jed comes to call on Jonathan in the fisherman's cottage, Roper manages to squeeze in a little night visit of his own.





	1. a story to tell

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jasmasson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jasmasson/gifts).



> Thank you to [fengirl88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fengirl88/pseuds/fengirl88) for beta reading.

‘Everyone assumes,’ Roper said, settling creakily onto the sofa, ‘that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth.’

Not everyone, Jonathan thought before he could check himself for snobbery, only the sort of person who would say _born with a silver spoon in my mouth_ without apparent irony. Rotary, golf-club and keen-on-roses ran through Roper like BRIGHTON on a stick of rock. Not suburbia, though, and not stockbroker-belt. Provincial market town: son of a bumptious bank manager who obsequiously wrote off the horsey set’s debts and goosed his secretary at the copier, or a vintner to the County—no, a wine merchant’s son probably wouldn’t pop extra-strong mints with vintage Moët, however much he loathed his dad.

‘—balls. My father was an Oxfordshire auctioneer—’

Of course. Per Angela’s orders, Jonathan had done as little unofficial research as he could bring himself to: what he didn’t know he couldn’t unconsciously betray he knew. But already he was beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea to have kept himself pure. The face of an Englishman who had been to a public school working out why he despised another who’d been to a different one was not an inscrutable thing. His bruises were already throbbing with the effort of neutrality.

‘Taught me the price of everything.’

Jonathan sensed he was meant to cap the fridge-magnet Wilde quotation: he stared stonily over Roper’s right shoulder. Roper went on, hardly missing a beat.

‘But the drive to create all this, that comes from me, and me alone.’

For a moment Jonathan was back in Poetry with elderly, elegant Fr Hannon.

> We know no time when we were not as now  
>  Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised  
>  By our own quick’ning power…

‘I think it’s hard for boys your age fully to understand the _enormity_ of Lucifer’s claim…but perhaps you can perceive the _vulgarity_ , as of a man who insists he is _self-made_ , when he has, for example, the good fortune to be making himself in Chipping Norton and not, say, Kigali—’

Truly, then, was Richard Onslow Roper the worst man in the world? Was he a man at all, or the Devil?

Roper’s fruity voice broke in on his memory. ’Where does it come from in you?’

‘I’m not sure I have what you describe,’ Jonathan replied carefully, taking a small pleasure in the mental reservation, which Fr Hannon would probably have accounted a sin (the pleasure, not the reservation). But perhaps he should give Satanic pride a try. Maybe he was giving it a try right now. How were you to distinguish it from its opposite, wild, radical Christian humility: _for he that will save his life, shall lose it_? Time, anyway, for a little studied simplicity.

‘OK, you patched me up. I’m very grateful for that. And now I’d like to go.’ He caught a whiff of his untouched champagne’s musty fragrance. _Fizzy drink treatment_ , he thought, and felt less inclined than ever to take a sip.

‘Corky can’t make you out, you see. Suspicious chap, Corks. He’s got bad vibes about you.’

Corkoran was a type. A type that, in another life, Jonathan had always rather liked: 2i/c to the staff section commander (Security and Intell.), shrewd and loyal, no _bon mot_ unturned, attains an absolute maximum height of 5’7” in suitable soils. Or, more precisely, he was the wicked looking-glass edition, crudely attention-seeking, fanatically cynical— _Beelzebub_.

‘Why’d you kill that fellow in Devon?’ Roper clearly enjoyed interrogation, he had a faintly indecent amateur glow about him now. ‘It's all over the wire. We had to call the police. No choice. Be here any minute.’

Well, that was feeble, if it was indeed sincerely meant to disconcert. He couldn’t even keep the rising note of wind-up out of his voice. As he held Roper’s gaze, Jonathan felt a sudden misgiving: perhaps he was playing it too cool, he should express some sort of mild alarm. But Roper’s face broke into approbation.

‘Well, you are a cool cucumber, aren’t you?’ It was the sort of thing he no doubt said to his small son.

‘He cheated me,’ Jonathan said crisply, as if it were the year of Waterloo and he a cavalry officer speaking of a debt of honour.

‘And you didn’t like that.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Quite right.’

Roper nodded, pompously abstracted, like a committee chairman daydreaming of fairways. Was that it? Was he in? It couldn’t be. But it might be the first obstacle scaled.

The terrace door opened and Corkoran barged in, right on cue. ‘The McArthurs have confirmed for dinner. So that makes twelve tonight.’

If all this went to plan, Jonathan realised, he would end up having to say housekeeperly things like that to Roper. He couldn’t quite picture it, somehow, and yet he was surprised to find he didn’t wholly loathe the idea. Nostalgia for the old night job, he supposed.

‘Or thirteen,’ Corkoran added, with a glare almost too pointed to be called pointed. It looked like the repartee was going to settle at hotel-guest level too. Jonathan had hoped for slightly better banter from the illegal arms trade.

‘Come and tell us why you think this one’s a bad apple, Corky.’

So this was to be the real grilling. Roper had a file. The first thing he pulled out of it was a photograph of Marilyn, about whom Jonathan tried not to think. Sex with her had been like the Blue Anchor lager he’d self-punishingly chosen—being the closest thing that Devon could offer to the Harp which cost his father his life—as Jack Linden’s tipple: bubbly, sticky, almost flavourless except for the depressingly saccharine aftertaste. It hadn’t helped that she’d been the first since Sophie. The sight of her must have produced roughly the right effect, though, because Roper breezed on, and Jonathan dutifully fed him the hook, line and sinker.

One of the goons came up the stairs behind him, the Scot, Frisky. Jonathan found himself, against his better judgement, contemplating how he might have acquired the nickname. Corkoran jerked his head in salutation.

‘Taken a lot of names, haven’t you?’ Roper mused. ‘Makes a man wonder who you really are.’

It was hell of a thing, to hear one of the rulers of the darkness of this world doing a rundown of your undistinguished CV. Bracing. Exciting. Bloody bucket list stuff.

_‘Father killed in Belfast…’_

It happened during Jonathan’s last term at St Omer’s Hall, the Shireburn prep. school. Hodder Playroom, boys aged ten to twelve, had just received their annual challenge from Rhetoric—the oldest pupils at Shireburn, men of eighteen—to a cricket match. As was traditional, the invitation was written in Latin, and the Hodder XI, jealous of their reputation as brilliant eccentrics, had enlisted Jonathan—just one more little rabbit keeping his end up on the pitch, but the best Latin scholar among them—to compose an answer.

He was just explaining why his _juventi_ was a particularly crushing response to Rhetoric's condescending _pueri_ , when Mrs Hesketh came to the door of the sitting room. She was the house ‘mother,’ the Head of Boarding’s wife, and although she was well-liked for baking excellent cakes and leading long, intrepid and muddy nature hikes, she was not actually a very cuddly person. Something had to be very serious for her to run her own errands rather than getting a boy to do it.

‘Jonathan. There you are. What are you doing in Elements’ sitting room?’ Though they all mixed together in the big playroom and study hall, it was unusual for an older boy to visit the sitting room of his juniors; unheard of, however, for those juniors to be invited into the sanctum sanctorum of his contemporaries’ sitting room. So here he was.

‘Helping them, Mrs Hesketh, with the Latin—’

‘Never mind.’ Why did grown-ups always ask questions that they couldn’t wait to hear the answer to? ‘Will you come with me, please? You’re not in trouble.’

It was nice of her to say that, but he hadn’t thought he was. Without ever quite acquiring a reputation for being a goody-goody, he rarely crossed the masters. But as she led him towards the Parlour, things started to assume a very wrong shape. Unlike the rest of the boarding house, which was meant to be cosy and as homelike as possible, the Parlour had never really left Victorian times. Pictures crowded the walls: engravings of the three Old Shireburns who had been canonised, St Ignatius Loyola wearing a golden scapular and holding open a book to a page reading AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM, St Francis Xavier surrounded by kneeling men in turbans, St Stanislaus Kostka looking like Walter the Softy with a lily.

In the corner closest to the door was a handless statue of Our Lady that had been desecrated at the Reformation and turned into a trough for pigs at Clitheroe Castle, but preserved for two and a half centuries by a miracle, and presented to the College on its return from exile in Liège. The shallow groove in her back did not look like it could feed many pigs, and Mr Hesketh said the story was probably a legend, but it illustrated a spiritual truth, about the persistence of the Faith in England during the Penal Times. The statue’s face stood level with Jonathan’s own (he often felt that he was not growing as he ought, for a member of such a tall family) but the proportions of the body were not quite human, and he did not like to turn his back on it. The parlour smelled of beeswax polish and something suffocating that Dad, who was an Old Shireburn, said (in a deliberately comical English accent, because he if he liked he could almost fool actual French people into thinking he was one of them) was _eau de mauvaise nouvelle et rustication_.

Mum was sitting on one of the slippery dark red chesterfields. Jonathan supposed that Mr Hesketh and the Rector must have been there too, but he only remembered her, in a closely-tailored black dress with wide gunmetal-grey belt and big gunmetal-grey buttons, rising to six foot one in her gunmetal-grey court shoes. Over her shoulder St Aloysius Gonzaga was being ushered towards the altar by a pretty angel whose sex was proclaimed only by a partially exposed flat chest, which made Jonathan obscurely uncomfortable.

‘Darling, I’m so very sorry,’ she said. ‘Daddy has been killed.’

He would never really forgive her for the composed candour of the announcement, even as he came to appreciate her third-generation daughter-of-the-regiment fortitude. His world had turned to ground glass, and the furthest thing from her mind, as always, was any exhibition in poor taste.

_‘…no close relationship with mother…’_

The summer before he went up to Oxford, he read _Brideshead Revisited_ , and was so startled by her resemblance to Lady Marchmain that he told her about it.

‘Really, dear? I couldn’t finish it. I found it rather sticky-fingered and sweaty.’

His laughter was extraordinary, immoderate, hysterical, explosive. ‘Mum,’ he wheezed, ‘that is _exactly what—Lady—Marchmain—would say_ ,’ and convulsed again. After fifteen seconds or so, she joined in.

_‘Married once, for six months, we can assume not a triumph…’_

He wasn’t a virgin on his wedding night: that would’ve been a bit much. But Alicia was the first woman he’d properly made love to, and when, wearing full dress uniform, he knelt at the altar of the Brompton Oratory to receive the nuptial blessing, he sincerely meant that she should be the only one to whom he ever did.

They’d met in Fresher’s Week of their second year at Oxford—considering that what people still back then called September The Eleventh rather than Nine-Eleven had just happened, you would have thought it’d be a bad idea to put the UOTC stall next to the Fawcett Society, but they hit it off like—well, like a burning building. And they seemed rock-solid: their circles of friends made mutual gallant exceptions for the feminist with a passion for Liberation Theology and the cadet officer who’d actually somehow seen fit to cast his first General Election ballot for William Hague. They _were_ rock-solid. They’d weathered Iraq, for Christ’s sake. Except they hadn’t, had they? Not really. Because two hundred and eighty-three days after they’d first received the Host as one flesh, she’d packed her bags and gone to live with a Visiting Professor from the University of Kentucky who specialised in Graphic Novels.

‘Comics?’ he’d said. ‘You’re leaving me for a balding bastard in his mid-forties who writes about bloody Superman for a living?’

Not just Superman, as she explained, but that was the gist. He could have lived without seeing the Robert Crumb ones.

_Two tours in Iraq, distinguished service…_

The reasons he was here, the things he’d told Angela about, that he was not about to let his mind rehearse for him in front of Roper and Corkoran, he’d mostly seen and done during the first tour. The action that got him mentioned in despatches happened then too: his company’s defence of the Civilian-Military Cooperation House in Al-Amarah against eighty attacks by the Mahdi Army over a period of twenty-three days. But it was the second tour that turned his stomach, like a pint of milk left for ten minutes outside the fridge in the heat of the Southern Iraqi desert. Some of that had to do with the general shittiness of being Rear-Operations Battlegroup, charged with guarding the airfield, running the detention facility and patrolling routes into and out of Basra, and some to do with the fact that running the detention facility essentially meant running a daily stagecoach service through UNSCR 1456, but he had to admit—in the privacy of his own thoughts if nowhere else—a lot of it had to do with Guinness & Co.

Guinness was one of _the_ Guinnesses (‘all Guinnesses are, one way or another’); he and his cronies Perron and Bingham were probably among the more intelligent—or crafty—junior officers on the base, but there was nothing exceptional about them. In fact, they were aggressively typical specimens of the British 2nd Lieutenant in the early years of the twenty-first century: Perron and Bingham were cousins, they had all been to public schools, Guinness to Oxford and the other two to Exeter and Nottingham, they groused continually and sunbathed in pink boxer shorts round the back of the Crow’s Nest and read surfing magazines and cruised the airfield blaring out Busta Rhymes and the Terror Squad and climbed the watertower to drink gallons of Coke Zero and challenge one another to pissing contests, literal and metaphorical. He hated them for being functionally indistinguishable from himself three or four years before, he hated himself for seeking to distinguish himself from them. (It never once occurred to Guinness, Bingham and Perron to acknowledge the slightest resemblance between themselves and Capt. Pine, whom they referred to—in their canvas haven by the humming gennies where they could pull out a Penguin Classic or use a trisyllabic word without their heterosexuality being called into question—as Henry the Fucking Fifth.)

Once, as they oversaw visiting afternoon at the detention facility, keeping a weather eye on a couple of beardy villains whose ‘families’ consisted entirely of black-clad, sullen young men whom no-one really believed _weren’t_ planning the next IED attack, Guinness frowned suddenly and said to Jonathan, ‘You know, if the tables were turned and it was—us—in, like, fucking Strangeways or something, we’d probably do the same, huh? But I’d like to think we’d play it a bit fairer.’

Jonathan gave him a narrow look, but Guinness’s face and voice were wholly sincere.

‘Yeah,’ Jonathan grunted, nonplussed, ‘play up and play the game.’

Had he actually thrown in the sponge because his brother officers were a bunch of coarse, spoilt, chauvinistic hoorays for whom he could not summon a grain of fraternal feeling, or because the decision to prosecute the war had been made in circumstances that were, to coin a phrase, _far from satisfactory_? Either way, it made him feel stuck up, fastidious, and more Catholic than ever, even though he’d effectively excommunicated himself after the breakdown of his marriage.

_And on return, what? Despair, depression…_

It didn’t seem that way at the time. He hadn’t had an epic crack-up or anything. He was just hacked-off, always tired, and the effort required to get his majority in a competitive Guards regiment suddenly felt too much, far too much. Once he’d realised that there seemed no point in applying to extend his short service commission, either. Luke Fleming, who was leaving at the same time to see if he could make a going concern out of a recently-inherited Gloucestershire manor house, asked Jonathan to come in with him. The decree absolute had come through, he had a few grand from the sale of the flat he’d bought with Alicia—he didn’t see why not.

His mother, already disappointed by the divorce, was appalled, insulted, personally betrayed: after an exquisitely civilised _sotto voce_ row in the Rex Whistler Restaurant, contact dwindled to cards and phone calls at Christmas and birthdays. His utter indifference to the prospect of seeing her again still scandalised him a little.

By the time Luke had proved to everyone’s satisfaction that he wasn’t the man to make a going concern of Larch Hill, Jonathan had completed a night school short course in hospitality management and had fourteen months relevant experience. He cut his losses fairly brutally and applied for a job in the Nefertiti Hotel, Cairo.

‘And five years as a night-owl in the hotel business. What was that? Hibernation? Burying yourself alive? Then a sudden moment of madness. Thieving, narcotics, _murder_.’

Roper’s hooded eyes glimmered like blue tourmaline and his long upper lip twitched. He was impressed—no, something more. Jonathan had seen that expression before, the small tense satisfaction that preceded battle fever, the ecstasy of firing, firing real bullets, firing live rounds at tender human flesh. He had to capitalise on it, but he was aware too of the other pair of eyes upon him, the eyes of a man who had seen his share of proper front line action, who like Jonathan himself was unsusceptible to combat euphoria, and who absolutely wasn’t buying any of what was going down here.

‘This is chaos, Jonathan.’ Roper’s voice rose with delight. ‘Do you even know who you are?’

Jonathan hesitated, he hoped not fatally. But it was all right, Roper was working himself up into a useful lather, outlining Corkoran’s theory that he was the Albanians’ inside man—itself helpfully, astutely close-but-no- _Romeo-y-Julieta_. Jonathan knew what would get Roper going, what would—well, what would turn him on. It just remained to be seen if he could pull it off: the ruthless brute with a touchy, entitled sense of personal honour.

‘Is this some kind of interrogation?’ he snapped.

‘Let’s pretend it is. Did you cook for them?’

‘No!’

It wasn’t washing with Corkoran, who interjected with a camp remark about mussels, but it didn’t have to, if he could seduce Roper. He wondered, as idly as one could in the circumstances, if gay men didn’t after all have a bit of an advantage on the intell. side: at least they knew when they were being romanced by another man.

Right, now or never. Channel all the guests throwing a strop because you’d caught them pissing in a corridor or wouldn’t let them drown themselves in the swimming pool when they were off their tits, but in the clipped accent of a disappointed Squadron Leader from about 1949—really, he should’ve done something before now with his schoolboy talent for acting, but the OUDS lot were insupportable, and as for Army am. dram.—

‘Listen, I haven’t asked for anything, all right? I don’t expect a reward. I certainly don’t appreciate this investigation into my personal life and frankly—’

(—my dear, I don’t give a damn—)

‘—I’m bored of your hospitality. Maybe I’m not squeaky clean. But nor I suspect are you and your little friend here, so maybe just leave it at that.’ He stood up, glowering at Corkoran, trying to gauge how often he and Roper were read as a couple, and how they felt about it.

‘“Little friend,”’ Roper snorted. Moderately often, then, and pretty unfazed. Perhaps they did have, or had at some time in the past, a friends-with-benefits arrangement. Corkoran wore a signet ring monogrammed RR: what else could it mean? 

‘I _know_ ,’ Corkoran trilled, with the exact pitch and tonality of Sybil Fawlty on the telephone to Audrey. ‘ _Charmant_.’

Jonathan turned to walk out, feeling as theatrical as Corkoran sounded.

‘Where are you going?’ Roper asked.

‘I’m leaving.’ Christ, he could’ve wished he really was. Frisky, stationed at the stop of the stairs, shifted out of neutral.

‘What are you going to do for a passport?’

‘I have a passport, in the name of Thomas Quince. Where is it?’

It occurred to him for the first time that the pot-smoking, snakebite-drinking, Call-of-Duty-playing, tourist-talent-shagging life of the real Thomas Quince, in or around Bude, had probably just become exponentially more difficult. He pulled himself up quickly—he needed to look sufficiently discomfited as _Corky_ , on Roper’s insouciant instruction, _socked him the bad news_.

‘…Tom Quince is on every wanted list on God’s earth. Murder, theft, sadly not buggery, but we’ll work on that…’

It must be tedious, to be the only gay in the fortress, and have to keep up a constant parade of low-grade poncing. Jonathan let his genuine irritation spill into the ostensible situation and snarled, ’That was my passport, that was mine.’

‘You’re going to have to learn to be someone else, aren’t you?’ Roper drawled, lolling almost supine on the couch. But then there came a scuffle of sandals from the terrace door and he sprang to his feet, roaring, ‘I said nobody in here!’

The girlfriend—he must stop thinking of her as that, she deserved better— _Jed_ , a curious diminutive for Jemima, it sounded more like a Co. Durham miner—stopped short and drolly lowered her sunglasses.

‘Sorry baby, I didn’t know. Jesus.’

‘Sorry, my darling. Didn’t know it was you,’ Roper murmured uxoriously.

She was astonishing; cream lace bikini over magnolia-flower skin, peach kimono over the lot, a long streak of paleness upon pale, carved by Bernini: he was surely meant to stare a little bit. His mind returned uncomfortably to the suite at Meisner’s, when Roper had told him to serve her more champagne in the bathroom, and he had very nearly obeyed, nearly been complicit in a sort of assault upon one of his guests, an invasion of privacy at least, because the man who was paying the bill told him to. He hated men who treated women like decoration, but hadn’t he just thought of her as a sculpture?

They linked hands above Corkoran’s head. The gesture caught Roper in a sturdy, potbellied attitude; his skin against her alabaster looked rough and barbecued, more than ever the indignant, dyspeptic, self-employed suburbanite. The ghastly thing about couples with a large age gap was they always made you _picture_ it—withered flesh against fullness and youth—

‘It’s actually good news. Thomas is going to be staying for a while, until he’s fighting fit again.’

She sat on the arm of the sofa and looked up at Jonathan with the practised ingenuousness of someone who had been finding ways to make herself shorter than the men in her life since she was about thirteen.

‘Oh. That’s great! Want to come for a swim?’ Her lips formed the exact reverse of, which was about a hundred times more alluring than, a pout.

He did. He fucking did. He felt wasted, wretchedly out of shape: to stretch his limbs and test his strength against the safe buoyancy of water would be a treat. But he’d prefer to do it alone, in the sea, not in cholorinated aquamarine and under Roper’s curiously petite snub nose. That was his kink, Jonathan supposed: to see a younger man desperately lusting after what he had bought instead of a painting, for the approximate price of a few crates of rocket launchers or canisters of choking, lung-dissolving death. Well, he wasn’t here to service Roper’s commonplace little fetishes of jealousy and domination. And she wasn’t really his type, if a man who’d had exactly three women in his life (one for ops purposes at that) could be said to have a type: she was too clean-limbed, unsensual, with the deep reserve of the socialite. Too much like his bloody mother.

‘Go on,’ Roper said, sounding horribly like a PT instructor, ‘Corky can lend you some Speedos.’

Assuming Corky’s Speedos were a _façon de parler_ , signifying more decorous and (he hoped) first-hand swimwear, he couldn’t really see the harm. Let Roper fantasise to his wicked heart’s content: for Jonathan she was as unthinkable a prospect as a hotel guest, and he would treat her with the friendly, professional courtesy due the same. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have all the practice in the world: an Englishman with an educated accent and moderate good looks working the night shift encountered pretty much every sort of proposition going, and was expected to handle them on his own.

‘I’d like to,’ he said. It came out huskier than he’d meant.

Corkoran’s face was fixed in a tolerant grimace, like a court jester whose king had snatched his balls and started juggling. Jed giggled and pressed a kiss to Corkoran’s hairline, but he held Jonathan’s eye. Such a world of tiny licences and monstrous prohibitions, of boundaries you didn’t know were there until they were transgressed.

Jonathan was to lodge in a cottage down the beach, and his principal duty—for now—was to amuse Daniel. He supposed that meant he was in like Flynn: if Roper didn’t want him under the same roof, he was nonetheless prepared to give him free range over the estate, and if he was capable of love at all, then Daniel might be the one human being for whom he felt it.

Corkoran’s expression was dangerously neutral, but there was nothing to be done about that for now. Jed slipped away with an unreadable backward glance.

Roper put his arm around Jonathan’s shoulder, headmasterly, and gave him the murder-merchant’s equivalent of a beginning-of-term pep talk—did he actually say _tight ship_ , without a hint of self-parody? He did. But, Jonathan was surprised to find that the intimacy did not repel him, nor the smell of sandalwood warmed by body heat, the peppermint and champagne on Roper’s breath.

‘…and I’m grateful. But if you step out of line, I’ll make you howl for your mother.’

You wouldn’t say that if you’d _met_ my mother, Jonathan thought, though screaming for your mother _was_ as common a response to grievous pain as cliché would have you believe—well, something didn’t get to be a cliché unless it really did happen a lot—and not all those agonised casualties could have received exemplary maternal nurturing. He’d done a bit of training on the point, enough to know that nobody _withstood_ torture exactly; though some rare individuals didn’t seem to break, it wasn’t a matter of courage or will, probably just of physiology. In his Sandhurst days, Dad had once served Mass with Robert Nairac, and was oddly proud of the brush with doomed celebrity.

Roper looked down at the plastic flip-flops which were the only footwear Jonathan now owned. ‘What size feet have you got?’ he asked abruptly.

For a moment, he couldn’t remember. Then it came back.

‘Twelve,’ he said, improbably, impossibly relieved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'We know no time when we were not as now': John Milton, _Paradise Lost_ , book V. 
> 
> Shireburn is a slight fictionalisation of Stonyhurst, and St Omer's Hall of its attached prep (junior) school St Mary's Hall. The cricket match between the prep school and the final year students is [a real thing](https://www.stonyhurst.ac.uk/rhetoric-vs-elements-cricket-match/) \- the younger pupils are always allowed to win by exactly one run.
> 
> Thanks to Prof. Vealish for supplying me with Latin. For the curious, Jonathan's entire answer reads: 'Juventi Rhetoricorum, / Nos, discipuli Scholae Hodderensis, / invitatim vestri accipimus. / Fortibus favebit Fortuna!'


	2. someone, but not me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A slight alteration has been made to Roper's canon itinerary to allow this scene to happen. I hope it's worth it.

The cottage door was ajar. There was no reason why Pine (should he think of him as Birch now? It had an agreeably flagellatory ring) should lock it: he didn’t have anything that needed protecting, none of Richard’s people did. They lived in the lap of luxury, but possessed nothing. Liberating, really: for a moment Richard almost envied them. But there was nothing to compare with being master of all one surveyed. He thought of his father, whose harrumphing insistence that an Englishman’s home was his castle increased in direct proportion to encroachments upon the stronghold by two successive wives, children, step-children, two re-mortgages, charwomen, caterers, handymen, gardeners, and eventually the nurses who superintended a decade of dementia. Richard always meant to do things differently: he would actually be lord of the manor, not just invoke him feebly in a cliché.

Still, the door troubled him. Pine had a tidy mind, but he was also capable of rampage. Richard did not want rampage on his patch, but he sensed that was not what the lightly creaking hinge seemed to indicate. The wedge of yellow light on the threshold had a whiff of ambush about it, but he felt a peculiar revulsion at the idea of summoning Tabby or Frisky: he had come to escape their leaden company and have Pine’s more mercurial demeanour to himself. And to turn back would be to make the insupportable admission that there might be a place in the compound where his writ did not run. 

He pushed the door open, ready to draw back, but nothing happened, so he took a clear confident step, and nothing happened, and a second, and— 

Then it happened. As he was half-expecting, he found his arms pinned with obdurate efficiency, a firm pectoral range pressed up against his shoulder blades, hot breath and spittle on the back of his neck and a kitchen knife to the front of it. His pulse ran high, blood surging like liquid fire, but a small steady intuition told him that, unlike the last time he’d been in roughly this situation, more than a decade ago, he had absolutely no chance of fighting his way out of it. Without conscious calculation, he let his body go limp. The unexpected dead weight made Pine lurch backwards as he released him. 

‘I’m sorry,’ Pine said, breathing heavily and not sounding in the least apologetic. ‘But you might have knocked, or called out.’ 

Richard braced at the knees, put his palms on his thighs, and straightened up. ‘Quite all right. I appreciate your concern for security. You don’t really need to, you know, Corky and the boys have things covered, but perhaps you’d like something little less—improvised, personal protection-wise?’ 

Pine looked down at the knife in his hand. ‘Wüsthof Ikon. Nice, unpretentious little blade.’ He tested the edge with his thumb. ‘Somebody hasn’t been taking care of it. And no thanks, I think I’ll be fine.’ He put the the knife down on the worksurface. 

Now that his own knees were steady, Richard could see that Pine was sweaty, more rattled than he had at first appeared, and with the Englishman’s inviolable instinct, he swung round and reached for the kettle. 

‘Tea or coffee? Can’t offer you anything stronger, I’m afraid.’ 

‘That’s OK,’ Richard replied, drawing aside the curtain that separated the dining area from the galley kitchen. ‘I know your appallingly temperate habits. I brought my own.’ He took his hipflask from his trouser pocket, stood it on the table, and sat down. ‘Coffee, then. You’ll join me, won’t you? The caffeine cancels it out.’ 

Pine filled the kettle, not taking his eyes off him. Richard looked back evenly until he was obliged to turn away to get the caddy and coffee pot from the cupboard. It was curious, the first, fleeting impression was of breathtaking good looks. But a moment’s study exposed unignorable flaws: furrowed, uneven brow, eyes set too close, chin girlishly pointed, that insufferably austere expression—as if a small, anxious boy were looking at you through the mask of the tough, soulful loner. But the physique—broad shoulders, slender waist, firm backside and sinewy, long thighs—that couldn’t be faulted. 

Thirty-five years ago, as a rowing Blue with Olympic ambitions, Richard could have boasted something similar himself. What would he give up to have it again? Not much, he had to admit, not even for the undoubted joy of inhabiting a body in peak condition, able to do with ease what others barely dared attempt, getting high on absorbing the pain of endurance, pushing always that little bit beyond your actual capacities. But how frail it was, in the end, compared to money and power. A minor road accident had ended his athletic hopes: in his final year he’d come off his bicycle on _bloody_ Mitcham’s Corner and smashed up his knee, leading to a tedious sequence of operations and, as the years went on, agonising intolerance of British weather. 

‘So,’ Pine said, bringing a single tumbler to the table, ‘what can I do for you?’ 

‘Well, let’s have a little light on the subject, for starters. Do you always sit around in the dark?’ 

Pine reached across him and turned on a small lamp on the bookshelf. ‘I was trying to sleep.’ 

‘Have trouble in that department, do you? You wouldn’t be the only one.’ 

Pine smiled blandly. ‘My body-clock’s naturally set for the late shift. Has been since I was about thirteen. Why, what keeps you up at night?’ 

‘Depends on the night.’ He poured a tot of whisky into the glass. ‘Tonight it’s domestic. Thought it politic not to dally in Monaco after the meeting. Still a bit of atmosphere after poor old Caro kicked off like that. County fillies used to be bred up to take it in their stride, but I suppose we’re all petty bourgeois now. Sandy shouldn’t be so damned predictable.’ 

The kettle whistled. Pine filled the pot and brought it through, along with two mugs. 

‘Dan was upset. He took it personally, I think,’ he said. There was no reproach in his tone, but Richard felt a momentary impatience nonetheless. Had he acquired a front of house man, or a damned nursemaid? No, no, it was all for the good. It anchored him to the organisation. 

‘Poor little sod. He’s had enough atmosphere to last anyone a lifetime, and he’s only seven. Still, kids are resilient, aren’t they?’ 

‘Depends on the kid.’ Pine gave a thin, hardy smile. 

Richard wondered if all these displays of stoical sensitivity were quite called for, but he said kindly, ‘You were.’ 

‘Yes and no.’ 

‘Best not to dwell on it, I always think. A good childhood’s one you don’t really remember. I say, speaking of Dans, you didn’t happen to see his phone anywhere, did you?’ 

Pine’s fingers paused on the plunger. ‘No. He said on Monday night he’d lost it. And I helped him look yesterday, but we couldn’t find it.’ 

Richard stared in disbelief. What he’d actually acquired, it seemed, was a fucking imbecile. Was he kicking Corky into touch for _this_? 

‘You—Monday _night_?’ he stammered. ‘What the hell were you playing at? You should have told me straight away. We’ve bricked it now, of course—but, damn.’ He thumped the table in frustration at the thought of the forty perilous hours the phone might have lain, active, in disloyal hands. If any member of the household staff were found to have handled it, retribution would be swift and brutal, but that in itself was an acknowledgement of its futility. He drank the whisky at a gulp. 

‘He was afraid you’d be angry, so I said that meant he had to tell you himself as soon as you got back from Monaco. He seemed to get my drift at the time. Did he?’ He pushed down the plunger, filled a mug and pushed it across the table. In the dim light his wary eyes appeared an improbable shade of sea-green. 

‘Were you Captain of your bloody House or something, Jonathan?’ Richard was not, in truth, much mollified, but something about the pose of incorruptibility was disarming nonetheless. 

Pine poured coffee for himself. ‘We said Head of the Line.’ 

‘Where was that?’ 

‘Shireburn.’ 

‘Oh. I wouldn’t have guessed. The digging foot, I mean.’ 

Pine glanced up at the ceiling; did he give the faintest of eye-rolls? ‘I’m not in good standing.’ 

Richard raised an eyebrow. ‘I dare say.’ 

‘It’s slightly different from being in a state of mortal sin,’ he added fussily. ‘Though I’m that as well, of course. Good standing is _pietas_ , going to Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation, confession once a year and communion at Easter, not the condition of your soul as such—’ 

Richard could not have been less interested in this casuistry. He waggled the hip-flask. Pine shook his head, so he dosed his own coffee. 

‘What was it like?’ 

‘What was what? Oh, school? All right. I liked it.’ 

‘Any scandals?’ 

Pine’s top lip curled infinitesimally over the mug. ‘People always ask that. And seem a bit disappointed when I say no, or not really. No industrial-scale drug-dealing, we left that to Ampleforth; one priest convicted of sexual abuse, but he was gone long before my time. Nothing that you wouldn’t get rather more of at an average suburban comp, in fact.’ 

Old school tie, or an individualist’s disdain for the too-obvious question? Richard thought the latter, but it wasn’t altogether easy to tell. Either way, it was clear Pine thought him crass. So crass he would be. 

‘Was there a lot of sex?’ 

‘Didn’t let girls in till the year after I left.’ 

Richard tilted his head, significantly. 

Pine had the grace to look shy. ’Oh, I see. But by my time that sort of thing—didn’t really apply. Couple of blokes I was friendly with were _gay_ , of course, but—’ 

‘Of course.’ 

‘Well,’ Pine replied, unruffled. ‘Probability. Between one in ten and one in twenty of the population.’ 

Richard saw him anew as the boy who used his enviable looks and his contemporaries’ concomitant presumption of impeccable heterosexuality to protest against the daily repertoire of insult: shirt lifter, fudge packer, arse bandit. It was curious that the active role was the one anathematised, when the other would seem to be the more shameful, or maybe it wasn’t: we deprecate what we fear. Richard had never been afraid of it, so he had never seen the point. 

‘But they weren’t out at school,’ Pine continued. ‘I only got to know for sure later. I suppose Eton in the sixties had its—traditions to maintain?’ 

Richard hadn’t thought Pine had so much bitchiness in him, but he liked it. ‘Seventies, _please_!’ 

‘Yes, of course,’ he murmured. ‘You start to forget how long ago—’ 

‘Not really. Free Love was all the rage, of course, but only the hetero sort. The other was felt to be out of date, I suppose. A _faute de mieux_ that was no longer necessary. Opportunity missed, I thought. At the time, and—’ Would he say it? Was it worth the inevitable complication? Goddammit, what did it matter? ’And—now.’ 

‘Really? I don’t expect you missed much. Teenage fumblings are pretty ghastly regardless.’ 

Richard said nothing, and watched realisation dawn. It was, regardless of the nature of the realisation, always one of his favourite sights. Pine took a deep breath, but kept his cool; Richard had expected no less. 

‘Caroline said you were—what was her phrase? Steadfastly faithful.’ 

Richard slung an arm over the chairback and slumped, feigning an insouciance he did not feel. He was excited, but he wasn’t sure if the excitement was sexual. His cock was soft. It was how he felt when he was about to close a negotiation, give a speech or order a test firing. Everything seemed _theoretical_. ‘Doesn’t count, does it?’ 

Pine snorted incredulously. ‘Jed might beg to differ.’ 

‘She’d be envious of me. As opposed to jealous. If you get me.’ 

‘Yes.’ 

‘It’s the sort of distinction I’d expect a Jesuit-educated boy to appreciate. I notice you haven’t said no.’ 

‘You’re not serious.’ Pine was still, obviously controlling his breathing. He ran a long, capable finger around the rim of his mug. 

‘I’ve been more serious, that’s true. But on the other hand, why not?’ 

‘I think you ought to go.’ Pine sounded like something in a play, the sort that Richard had gallantly donned dinner jacket and taken his step-mother to when he was a sixth-former, forging an uneasy détente over Terence Rattigan as the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ peaked at #2. 

‘Thing is, Jonathan, you can’t very well chuck me out of my own house, you know.’ 

Pine broke his gaze, staring over Richard’s shoulder into the kitchenette. Richard sensed that one might follow his eye to something incriminating, but probably he was just regretting that the knife was out of reach. ‘What do you want? Is this some kind of test? A condition of my being allowed to leave?’ He made a small, cross, contained gesture. 

‘Not at all. I’ve something quite different in mind for that. You’ll find out tomorrow. I was just curious.’ He thought of Pine’s shoulders and arms breaking the surface of the swimming pool, of his cautious, baseline-hogging style on the tennis court. ‘I thought you might be curious too.’ 

Pine lowered his head and ran a slow hand through his hair. When he looked up again it was if he had sloughed something off: he looked remade, clean and pitiless, in the lineaments of reckless ennui. This was the last human face, Richard thought uneasily, that the poor fucker in Devon—what was his name, Sean, Shane, Wayne Harlow?—had ever seen. Men who had killed, hand to hand, face to face, did emanate a certain something—Corky had it, even Tabby and Frisky. A puling CND type would surely remark that Richard had been responsible for more deaths than they could ever dream of, but it wasn’t the same, just as taking delivery of a lorryload of frozen drumsticks and nuggets wasn’t the same as wringing a chicken’s neck. 

‘All right.' Pine stood up abruptly; the chairlegs screamed on the tiles. 'But I’m not doing something squalid and deniable in here. Come into the bedroom.’ 

Richard wasn’t sure if Pine had meant to make him feel like a trick, and if he was supposed to be aroused or abashed by it—he was still neither, but the balance was beginning to tip to arousal. It would be satisfying to put a crack in Pine’s carapace, even if it was the trivial, purely physical sort engendered by climax. As Richard followed him to the bedroom, Pine tugged his t-shirt off with exhibitionist flair and slung it over his shoulder. He was really quite a tart. Catholic girls, in Richard’s experience, rarely lived up to their lubricious reputation: perhaps Catholic boys did. 

Pine turned on the bedside lamp and closed the blind. The bed separated them. For a hysterical moment Richard thought he was going to indicate the location of the climate control panel, the minibar, the TV remote, will-there-be-anything-else-sir? But he just laid the t-shirt aside and unbuckled his belt. 

‘You too,’ Pine said. 

Richard swallowed dryly: it was an order, and he rather relished Pine’s cheek, but he had not exposed himself to first-time sexual scrutiny since acquiring Jed, eighteen months ago, and not to a man’s since he had cut the figure of a not-quite-Olympic rower. He applied himself to the buttons of his shirt. There was a small thump as Pine’s trousers hit the floor. Wearing just underpants, he looked like an advert for underpants, something on a bus shelter, that a vandal would come along and scrawl a dick on. 

Except—Richard realised that he had been adhering more or less to locker-room protocol, and nothing, at that moment, could be more redundant. He let himself stare as he shrugged out of his shirt. Pine’s cock was hard; grey jersey (Corky’s choice, presumably, he was a man who thought about such things) and deep shadow made a fine picture of it. Pine knelt on the bed. Richard took a step closer and laid the flat of his hand against Pine’s chest, almost hairless, but not shaved: there was a patch of sparse curls in the centre, some more around the nipples. Richard swept his hand over Pine’s pecs and stomach. His flesh was improbably firm and faintly clammy; it felt like bringing marble to life. 

Pine grabbed and tugged the waistband of Richard’s trousers, inviting him onto the bed. 

‘Hold on.’ Richard hurried for the social advantage of total nudity, no longer caring what Pine might think of the southward slump of his musculature. He was only half-hard even now—that was middle age for you—and his cock bobbed about absurdly as he freed it from his underpants and climbed on the bed. But the very absurdity seemed to have a certain virile swagger about it, which would be ruined were they to kiss. There was something grotesque about grown men kissing, rubbing stubbled chins together; to forestall it he caught Pine’s jaw in his hand and ran his thumb roughly over his lips. Pine kept his mouth closed, throwing his head back to expose an astonishing length of tender throat. When Richard pushed the point, though, he yielded charmingly. After a few thrusts with his thumb, Richard substituted his fore- and index fingers, enjoying the distended look when he pressed the walls of Pine’s mouth. He was completely hard at last: with his free hand he gave himself a couple of strokes. 

‘Are you any good at giving head, Jonathan?’ He pushed Pine’s tongue down so he could only groan and choke. ‘Have you ever actually sucked a chap off before?’ 

Pine’s eyes were wild with humiliation and defiance, but his prick was still straining hard. He shuddered as Richard withdrew his fingers. 

‘Why don’t I show you how it’s done? Hm?’ 

Pine hadn’t expected that little refinement: he gasped. Distrust flickered across his face, but he nodded warily. At Richard’s push to his shoulder he obediently leaned back, resting on his hands. He was a picture, you had to say that. A fairly pornographic one. Richard positioned him to his satisfaction, running hands up his thighs to spread them, brushing his balls with the back of his hand, tweaking his nipples to make him arch his back and shiver, all the little objectifications that beautiful women, having too much of it from the world at large, tended to resent, but beautiful men could never get enough of. By the time he had everything just so, Pine was making small tense sounds through his teeth; a dark patch had appeared on the light grey of his underpants. Richard bent to the sickeningly well-proportioned outline filling them and mouthed it through the fabric; it sprang in the semi-independent way of pricks, that looked most odd when it was not your own. 

‘Christ,’ Pine murmured, as Richard blew on the dampened material, ‘I had no idea.’ 

Richard wanted to ask what he had no idea about, but he had a sense he wouldn’t like the answer, so he eased the waistband of Pine’s underpants down so that most of him was out, but his balls were still trapped. He hadn’t tasted cock since—the birthdate on Andrew Birch’s passport flashed vividly to mind—since before Pine was born, conceived even. That was not a good thought to be having right now: he banished it. 

He liked the taste, truth be told, as much as he liked the ranker savour of cunt, or perhaps it was just Pine’s he liked; mingled with the musk of his crotch was a boyish scent of the seaside: kelp, sand and the inevitable coconut of sunscreen. He wondered if he’d been losing out, all this time. He hadn’t consciously ever missed it: his line to himself was that just as he’d joined Footlights to prove to himself that he wasn’t a comedian, he’d messed about with Miles at every Footlights party to prove he wasn’t gay. 

It was abominable, how your mind wandered: he’d done this mainly to see Pine with his guard down, and now his murmured string of blasphemies and expletives was no more than a distant ambient soundtrack to Richard’s reminiscence of an interminable sketch he’d devised with Miles, parodying sentimental American post-apocalyptic science fiction—he could remember every laboured line—which somehow led into a memory of his stand-up row in the Eagle with the cox of the Lady Margaret VIII after the ’79 Lent Bumps. 

It wouldn’t do, he was growing bored, and Pine was still, as far as he was any judge of these things, some distance from the finish line. A finger up the bum had always done it for him, but that had been in the prelapsarian days of the late 70s, when Miles kept a tube of KY in a crocodile-skin cigar case, embellished with a jet and gold leaf medallion of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, in his back jeans pocket. There was a spot behind the balls you could apply some pressure to, but he wasn’t at all sure he could locate it with precision—worth a try, though, surely. 

He slipped his fingers behind the underpants and fondled Pine’s bollocks for a bit, then essayed the springy patch beyond them. Pine grunted obscenely and affirmatively, but it still seemed like an aeon before he came, with a high, thin squeal and a convulsive jerk of his hips. Swallowing was like a mistimed oyster, letting the packet slide down your throat too easily and not getting the benefit. 

Pine with his guard down, carapace cracked, Pine post-coitally vulnerable—why had he imagined it would be a revelation?—was merely a series of inarticulate noises and apologies, _hang on, my foot’s gone to sleep_ , a wriggle and kick, finally discarding the underpants, until he lay full-length on his back, hands folded behind his head, blinking and smiling crookedly. 

‘Fuck,’ he sighed. ‘I’ve never—I mean, I didn’t imagine, when you—’ 

‘Yes, it has been a crowded hour.’ 

‘Do you want me to—?’ 

‘Yes, I rather think so, don’t you?’ Richard straddled his chest before he could get any ideas, shoved a second pillow behind his head. He slapped his face playfully, and in response to his reflexive flinch administered a slightly more earnest backhand, reddening the golden skin. 

‘Look lively.’ Richard tapped Pine’s parting lips with his cock. ‘Open wide, say aah. Let’s see those tonsils.’ 

Pine’s look of irritated embarrassment was really very attractive; Richard giggled as he breached his mouth. He was ginger at first, and slightly clumsy, perilously grazing Richard’s foreskin with his teeth, which turned out rather nice, but could very easily not have been. Richard usually relished the sight of his lovers’ cheeks bulging with dick, but Pine’s solemn, chivalrous look as he nodded and slurped was too comic for words: where the hell did he get off with this noble paladin act of his, a common thief who’d pilfered from dear pedantic old Meisner and used the proceeds to run amok through half the West Country? He was Dan’s white knight, he supposed, but still, pretty greyed in the wash. What if Corky wasn’t wrong? Corky had proved unreliable, and it seemed increasingly likely that his drinking or his procession of rent boys were the starting point for the investigative line drawn between Apo and Sandy, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t right about Pine. 

Imagine if Corky could see them now: he’d go off like a stubby little Roman candle, perhaps in more than one sense. Much as he hated Pine, he must surely want him: Richard wanted him, and he wasn’t even gay. Jed—no, he didn’t need to bring Jed into this. 

It occurred to him that he could do whatever he wanted with him: Pine’s shining armour would not let him admit defeat, or even protest. He cupped the back of Pine’s head, tangling his fingers into the bronze waves of his hair, and drove him hard until his breath came in sobs and he gagged. He relented and then did it again, and again. He wouldn’t last long, this way, but he didn’t want to. The insistent undercurrent of orgasm started, low in his abdomen, and he let himself be borne away. 

‘I’m going to decorate your pretty face, Jonathan,’ he muttered. ‘You ready for that?’ He crammed his head down one more time, then withdrew all the way, letting him drop on the pillow, and wanked his way over the edge. 

Richard could usually put on a pretty impressive show in terms of volume, especially if it had been a few days, and Jed’s recent sulks served him admirably now. 

The boy looked a sight: his hair furrowed and tumbled on his forehead, blobbed with come, his eyes red-rimmed and watering, a thick, mucous pearl traversing the side of his nose, a cataract of dribble glistening over his chin. The shadows curiously replicated the bruises he’d had when he arrived. He coughed and made to wipe his face; Richard caught his wrist with one hand and with the other scooped some of the spunk from his cheek and fed it to him. He took it meekly, like an invalid, but his bloodshot eyes were blazing with shame and rage: St George fused with the Dragon, Richard thought, fancifully. His work here was done, though he was not quite sure what that work was, and suspected already that it may have been a mistake. He often felt a bit low after a shag, he supposed most men did; Pine, though, clearly got the full poleaxing tristesse monty. That was Catholics all over. Miles, for all his affectations, was C of E, but he had not infrequently wept, and quoted: All this the world well knows; yet none knows well / To tum ti tum ti something hell. It was Shakespeare, anyway. 

Richard climbed off him and reached down to the floor for the handkerchief in his trouser pocket. 

Wiping his face as Richard put his underpants back on, Pine coughed and croaked, ‘Do I get a ring?’ 

It wasn’t very inspired, but it broke the tension. Richard chuckled and said, ‘I’ll still love you in the mor—’ 

‘No,’ Pine interrupted, no jocosity in his expression. ‘A signet ring.’ He pinched his left pinky between the thumb and forefinger of the other hand. 

‘Oh. I see.’ Richard pulled up his trousers and buttoned the fly. ‘Corky doesn’t wear that because we—I mean, we never have. That’s not how it is.’ 

Pine made a derisive noise. Richard made a point of never being embarrassed, but he was exasperated. ‘For Christ’s sake. Why would I lie? There’s no future in pretending to you of all people, that I’m not—bisexual,’ (he had never used the word of himself before, as it happened). ‘But Corky’s not my type and I’m not his. You must see that.’ 

Pine stared back, wordlessly. His long, naked body looked like an Art Deco bas-relief on the front of a public building: flat, over-emphatic and totalitarian. Outdoor noises—cicadas, the lapping sea, the distant scream of a civet cat—flowed into the room. 

‘If you really must know,’ Richard said, ‘he wears it because I saved his life.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Footlights: the Cambridge University comedy theatre club.
> 
> 'his stand-up row in the Eagle with the cox of the Lady Margaret VIII after the ’79 Lent Bumps': the Eagle is a pub in Cambridge, the St John's rowing team is called Lady Margaret after the college's founder, the Bumps are slightly eccentric sort of boat race held in both early spring (Lent) and May.
> 
> 'All this the world well knows; yet none knows well': Shakespeare, Sonnet 129.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a pure TV-verse fic, and I've made up backstory (which I'm sure contradicts the novel) like billy-o. The action takes place during episode 3.
> 
> Chapter and fic titles from Nina Simone's 'Plain Gold Ring'.


End file.
